Nathan Cole Verhoeven

You are standing in a dark kitchen in Phoenix, in a man who is five-foot-three at most, and you have been him for less than a minute. You can feel it: the short legs, the beauty mark that you keep touching with your tongue's idea of it. His refrigerator hums. The tile is cold through his socks. You came here for a reason you will not say, and the reason is simple: you opened his closet, and every hanger was turned the same direction, and you understood that he was a man who had never once been surprised. You wanted to be surprised. So you go back to the page with the wheel on it, and you pay, and you spin.

The light goes out of the kitchen.

Mattress. Your cheek is pressed into a pillow that smells of someone's hair, and your right arm is hanging off the edge, the blood gone thin in it. Your breath is ragged and wet, a man's breath dragging over a soft palate. Then it evens out, all at once, and you draw the arm up. The body rolls. It is heavy and it moves like a sack of warm water. You lie on your back with your hands folded at the chest, and somewhere in him a thing that has never once happened has happened.

Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the blanket. Your belly rises under your folded hands.

The T-shirt against your back is damp and old, and it gives you something before you ask. His hands pulling it over his head in a classroom closet, years ago, a kid's marker streaked on the cuff, and the shame of being seen by a ten-year-old with his shirt half off. Then the pants, soft at the knees. A morning in the garage under the house: the driveway so steep he rides the brake the whole way down, the cold white light, the lanyard with the keys swinging against his chest. He puts it on every day like a vow.

The sheet under your fingers is tangled, and it gives you her. Not the girlfriend. The other one, the woman who got away, laughing in a car with the window down, and the ache of it arrives in his chest as a plain fact, like weather. He still checks, some nights, whether she has posted anything. He prays about it afterward, ashamed, in the careful words of his church. Your own wanting has no such words.

The hair on his neck is long and damp against the pillow. You feel the narrow beard along his jaw. The body is thirty-four and tired in the knees, and strong in the shoulders from carrying boxes of other people's children's paper. Your hands know how to hold chalk, to cap a marker without looking. They know a hundred small kindnesses.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. They are wide and pale and entirely yours for now. You look up at nothing.

"Huh," you say, in his voice, low and a little hoarse. "So it's you."

The ceiling doesn't answer. You wonder how long the wanting takes to come back, whether it is days, or whether it is already stirring somewhere beneath his ribs, whether you will still be lying here, in him, when the light turns gray.